I was responsible for compositing live action in a 3d setting and vice versa. For the 3d part, I mostly took over the lighting, scene assembly and at times on basic 3d modelling and texturing.

Adding live action in 3d was a complex task as we used a stereo camera setup instead of a ‘regular’ 360 camera to boost quality. Therefor we had to do quite some math to make sure the external shoot was prepared very well to receive back correct shots to add to 3d and both will fit with very well.

In Meeting Rembrandt, every scene contains a special made background setting where we put the live action with Fusion. We used several tricks to tweak the shots to the best we can and have them match perfectly with the 3d. An offset of a few pixels can already break the experience. Complex tasks such as creating depth passes out of live action shots and warping those has been key to success.

The first version of the project was rendered in Mental Ray, the next iteration took place with Arnold for Maya. Getting the rendering done was a challenging task. One plate of full sharp and crisp image with high quality setting with a max resolution of 4k could took several hours to complete. We used a lot of compositing to add animation and liveness into the single rendered images.

To push quality, we had the chance at ForceField to seek for the best possible way to create this project and found solutions to several technical and artistic challenge.

Meeting Rembrandt features Derek de Lint as one of the painted persons at the ‘Nightwatch’. Reinout Bussemaker is playing Rembrandt and did a fantastic job. He is well known for theatrical plays and that perfectly makes sense for a VR experience.

Also on a little side note, the intro in the video was recreated by me using the Unreal engine. 🙂

Watch the release trailer of Meeting Rembrandt! The app can ben downloaded for free at the Oculus store and is currently for Android available and the Gear VR headset.